contested and significant epoch designation modernism and early twentieth-century British music do not sit comfortably together. All too often, a piece of music is perceived as either modernist (as is the
vant-garde or other continental European or American trends in composition) or as British (as are Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Holst, Walton, or even Britten).
At best, the narrative of a time lag between continental modernism and a British modernism centred around Britten or the avant-garde of the New Music Manchester
Group (here meaning composers Alexander Goehr, Harrison Birtwistle, and Peter Maxwell
Davies from the mid-1950s onwards) was able to quell this problem a problem that remains aggravated by the Dickensian notion of Britain as the land without music .1 More recent attempts to bridge the gap between early twentieth-century modernism and British music have tried various solutions, but one of the most obvious has not been applied rigorously: a look among British women composers of the early twentieth century. This is not to say, fortunately, that there are no studies about Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Grace Williams,
Elisabeth Lutyens, Elizabeth Maconchy, or Imogen Holst (in order of date of birth). Yet behind this statement lurks a further powerful confrontation next to the one between
1 Oscar A. H. Schmitz, Das Land ohne Musik. Englische Gesellschaftsprobleme (3rd ed., Munich: G. Müller, 1914). Schmitz maintains that the lack of music in English society is a signifier of its lack of great individuals and individuality in general, which is created by an assumed mediocrity deeply rooted in the entire society (pp. 28 9). The study of British music has engaged with this verdict in various ways and the catchy title still enjoys frequent usage as a rhetorical device (cf. Andrew Blake, The Land without Music: Music, Culture, and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain Victorian Literature and Culture 32.1 [2004], 261 Myth and a Legend. The The Musical Times no. 1904 [2008], 53 60; et al.).
1 modernism and British music; that of modernism and gender. Again, an outdated tradition, this time of separating modern composers and modern women composers in British music
(fo European Music in the Twentieth Century), rears its head, implying that women composers generally pursue different agendas in their compositions than modernist (men) composers,2 or that they are simply incapable of composing well in any style. th birthday celebrations in The
Listener of 1966, critic Stephen Walsh launched an attack in this vein:
leading composers of her generation. To my ears there has always been an element of dryness
-feminist to suggest that it may have something to do with her sex. Female creative artists have always been rare even in literature, the most immediate of the arts while in music, at least, the gap between men and women in performance is small, if indeed it exists. Here again it is most measurable at the very top, where interpretation fades into visionary genius a quality which is demonstrably anti- feminine. [...] And with Lutyens, even in maturity, it remains true that her music often makes structural points which are hamstrung by the ordinariness of her creative thought. 3
Although this opinion sounds ludicrous to modern ears,
Sally MacArthur has called it, has still not been resolved, despite several waves of feminism and their different strategies to tackle it.4 This paper suggests that the main reason that women
2 European Music in the Twentieth Century (London: Penguin, 1957, 1961), 132 Hugh Wood, which discusses works by a number of British composers among them Elisabeth Lutyens as the only female composer on equal footing.) 3 The Listener, 8 December 1966, 869. 4 -first century MLA Notes 64.2 [2007], pp. 209 15) has refused to go away Musicology Australia 36.1 [2014], pp. 36 52).
2 composers have not been considered as salutary British modernists is that early twentieth- century modernism .5 In order to validate this claim and at the same time cut out a working definition of modernism, we can look to
(and in extension, its canons) as well as its aesthetics and criticism.
peer groups in the arts, literature, and music are populated with alpha males such as Wyndham Lewis for the Vorticists, Kirchner for Die Brücke, Marinetti for the
Futurists, or Schoenberg and Webern for the Second Viennese School. Even a popular survey of musical modernism and the early twentieth century, The Rest Is Noise, cannot break free from this impression: The only woman composers preceding late-twentieth century modernists are Mahler (albeit merely in and an unreliable biographer), Tailleferre, and Crawford Seeger.6 Needless to say, important sidekicks of at least Mahler- were affiliated with early twentieth-century modernist groups. F librettist of Erwartung, Marie Pappenheim, or his pupils Natalie Prawossudowitsch and Dika
Newlin, to name but a few, bore the flame for women modernists in some of high modernism environments. Yet the canons of modernism (here meaning a mostly high-brow response to the perceived dissolving of tonality in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century) are still more often than not assembled from men, from continental-
European and American , and from masculine attributes ascribed to the included pieces. the fourth instalment of The
Oxford History of Western Music is symptomatic of the lack of women composers as well as of British composers generally. Instead of opening the canons, it ascribes maximalism both to
5 T musical modernism are not inherently misogynist, but [...] modernism indeed provides a space for forms of expression by Ellie M. Hisama, Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford Seeger, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], 11). I in fact agree with Hisama that there is nothing wrong with modernism itself, but more space for women composers is needed in the canons of British musical modernism. 6 Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise (New York: Picador, 2007).
3 the composer of the gigantic Gurrelieder, Schoenberg, as well as to the composer of miniature orchestral pieces, Webern, as if the seal of quality was to be won in a competition for the most extreme quantity of bars and parts (a reading which does an injustice even to
Schoenberg and Webern themselves).
Meanwhile, a more parochial ongoing discourse about musical modernism in Britain is in danger of overlooking some of its most promising (women) modernists. Of these, the composer with the most undeniable affiliation to modernism (in the traditional sense as emancipating dissonance) is Elisabeth Lutyens one of the earliest dodecaphonists in the country and incidentally trailblazing collection British Music and Modernism. 1895 1960.7
the gap between modernism and British music. This article examines different layers on
(the dominant continental composition technique of her time and her composition process of choice in her concert music) and how her engagement with it was read both in her critical and analytic reception. Against the resulting entanglement of gender and composition technique, this examination sets the notion
, which is supported by choices in her texts and her settings, in particular her cantata for soprano, mandolin, harp, guitar, and strings, O saisons, ô châteaux! of 1946. This work serves as the central case study for the exploration of the path
Lutyens took in order to transcend a superimposed masculinity of modernism. Although this
Cantata is a relatively early piece in her official oeuvre, it can stand as representative of some of her best compositions, having frequently been singled out as one of her finest works and
7 British Music and Modernism. 1895 1960, ed. Matthew Riley (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 269 291.
4 having been devoted more space to the process of its conception and composition in her autobiography than many other works. 8
The aversion to the woman composer expressed in is couched in an ideology which portrays female composers and , independently of which idiom they choose to express their ideas in. Men composers, by contrast, are credited with the ability of being a makes a good performer or a muse owing to her ordinariness and, presumably, her sensitivity, but the
nary, and above all male, creative thought (coincidentally, a book like popular twentieth-century music survey, albeit critical of this idea, repeats it: His twentieth-century women can be teachers, performers, librettists, and wives, but rarely composers in their own right). that of his more prominent romanticist predecessor Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who sought to separate genius and femininity forever by claiming that women
gh hard work. But the celestial fire that
emblazen
sublime
writings. These creations are as cold and pretty as women; they have an abundance of
9
8 New Music 88 (1988), 11. 9 Jean- the Lied, 1775 in Jane Bowers, Judith Tick (eds), Women Making Music (Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 225 (referenced in Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics , 36).
5 Walsh may have been in exalted company, but the expression of his world view still provoked a strong response by pianist Susan Bradshaw and composer Richard Rodney Bennett in the following issue of The Listener, where they O saisons ô châteaux!
(among other pieces) .10 Walsh in turn responded in the same issue with the clarification that gist of my argument was that although women made excellent artist-technicians (at least as good as men), there was a certain quality of femininity which made it unsuited to creative art at the highest level. 11
Admitting that his remarks [him] in pretty Walsh refrained from reviewing another Lutyens piece for The Listener until his throughout positive preview of her
Charade Time Off? Not a Ghost of a Chance! in 1972.12 His argument, as he maintained, was indeed general, insofar as his opinion applied not just to contemporary women composers, but potentially to all women composers of all times, with a rigid and traditional set of
consequently bad music if
In this world, it does not matter whether a woman composes a romantic symphony or a twelve-tone cantata the results will most likely be Where a relatively new and contested way of organising pitch enters into this mix, things become more complex.
A O saisons, ô châteaux! in The Western Morning
News illustrates additional problems with form, genre, and idiom:
10 The Listener, 29th December 1966, 969. 11 12 Cf. The Listener, 2nd March 1972, 284.
6 Arthur Rimbaud, one felt that a maximum of means was used to produce a rather
meagre effect. Miss Field-Hyde sang the difficult vocal part with skill and assurance. 13
As short as it is sharp, this anonymous review of the 1947 premiere in the Wigmore
Hall London criticises
in an appropriate idiom. Again mirroring Rousseau, the critic felt in serialism , although the details of this effect are not elaborated on. Despite its brevity and, superficially,
, the review is reminiscent of
(albeit still chamber) forces would be deployed by a woman composer, only to fail to produce what we could call a masculine effect Walsh. Half jesting, Grace Williams, too, confirmed the existence of this crippling stereotype as late as
1961: in a short and throughout critical symposium of women in music in The Composer, she
molto barbaro movement and have it regarded as just part of his nature and not in any way
14 could be traced back to conclusions such as , that by composing women per se transcend their natural limits and that, for orchestra. Likewise, the apparently in performance is a reminder of
Both critics may have used Lutyens to muddy the waters of two contemporary issues: (1) a challenge by women composers, who had begun to take on British music life, not least in efficient collaborative efforts such as the MacNaghten-
13 The Western Morning News, 13th February 1947, 2. 14 Composer 6 (1961), 19 22, 21.
7 Lemare concerts, and (2) the provocation which an advanced i
Cantata twelve-tone serialism, henceforth , as The Times of O saisons the string tremolandos, thus giving to the music a kind of iridescence which relieved its rather
15
to allegations of this kind was about as dry as Walsh found her music. or should
16
17 This sentiment implies a larger point, which was shared by prominent contemporaries such as Elizabeth
Maconchy, who complained that it is a mistake to divide composers into men and women as if the music they write is necessarily different. If there is a difference, it is something far
Can any honest
18 Rephrased as a thought
argument is twofold: that, given an unknown piece of music, listeners would struggle to tell whether it was written by a woman or a man, but mostly that to ask the question whether the composer is a woman or a man is the wrong approach to start with. The logical consequence for her and Lutyens was what later feminists might perceive of as a nearly anti-feminist rejection of the term woman composer and characteristics attached to it. The reason for this rejection, however, was realisation that
s not simply a neutral
15 Unsigned The Times, 12th February 1947, 6. 16 Lutyens, Maconchy, Williams and Twentieth-Century Music: A Blest Trio of Sirens (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 155. 17 Elisabeth Lutyens, Murray Schafer, British Composers in Interview (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 103 12, 104. 18 Composer 6 (1961), 19 22, 20.
8 that is distinct and clearly different from the great artist ,19
weak and charming. But
20
Even where the contested term itself did not enter criticism, however, there was still room for stereotyping. In a 1950 The Listener article celebrating a forthcoming programme dedicated to
, John S. Weissmann claimed that O saisons, ô châteaux! possessed a certain transparency of texture and a conspicuous lightness of touch and that Lutyens difference to other dodecaphonists and her
.21 Although the critic took pains to also stress her intellectuality and individuality in general, the specific feature of transparency here is tied to a haptic, physical quality in effect the proverbial touch. The implications of this haptic resonance become clearer when compared to a roughly contemporary review of a piece with certain similarities to O saisons ô châteaux! such as Webe Concerto and
and represent important milestones transparency is concerned, however, this is expressed in a different context and language:
In its glorification of the interval, its crystalline transparency [...], its utter and final
renunciation of nineteenth century subjectivism, its extremely subtle dynamic and color
(Klangfarben) differentiations, its unequivocal formal definition, all embraced by
19 Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses. Women, Art and Ideology (London: Pandora, 1981), 114, my emphasis. 20 Lutyens, Schafer, British Composers, 104. 21 The Listener, 3 August 1950, 177.
9 important points of departure for a whole new generation of composers. 22
Concerto defines its composer as intellectual rather than haptic, as high modernist
- , and as the pursuit of either extreme, be it in length, texture, form, or pitch organisation) rather than miniaturist.23 The difference between the imagined masculine and feminine attributes of composers run along the lines of a masculine intellect capable of creating intelligent and stimulating music and a feminine mind that is at its best when relying on its body, either as a performer (Walsh) or as a composer of music with a haptic quality (Weisman). If the feminine mind oversteps these limitations by seeking to compose in a cerebral technique, its creations tend to be It must be noted that all these definitions and attributions of masculinity and femininity can only ever convince to a degree, but not so much because they are obsolete today, but because they are fraught with contradictions. Thus, the male genius has important attributes of stereotypical femininity, such as an excess of sexuality and sensitivity, up to, and including, hysteria, but the female hysteric is never portrayed as a genius. The stereotypical female is limited by her role in physical procreation, but it is the male genius that transcends his sexual drive to procreate intellectually. Male genius is like a woman, but never is woman.24 In this article I do not attempt to play upholding an imaginary divide between masculine and feminine attributes. The price the following thoughts pay for this refusal is that the divide retains its contradictory vagueness.
22 Notes, Second Series, 17/1 (1959), 136 137 (my emphasis). 23 Richard Taruskin, Music in the Early Twentieth Century (The Oxford History of Western Music vol. 4, Oxford
24 Battersby, Gender and Genius, 3.
10
ervative world of contemporary British music criticism relaxed over time as more and more informed reviews of her music began to appear and more fellow twelve-tone composers emerged, challenges to her music have not disappeared.25 A very different sort of masculinity, which, in confirmation of the previous
attributed to serialism itself, has been a target for second-wave feminist authors in one of the most canonical texts of the New
Musicology, Susan McC Feminine Endings. Although one could argue that serialism does away with prominent in music feminine second themes, sweetness or simplicity of melody atonal music through the implication of a gender-neutral system of rules and regulations for this most absolute of absolute musics, this is not how feminist musicology of the recent past has viewed it. Rather, McClary claims on of rules is a powerful illusion, because all it really demonstrates is the male genius taking control again:
-tone system], the rational
frame guaranteeing social order comes to permeate the dissonant discourse of the
madwoman, and the chromaticism of feminine sexual excess no longer poses a threat:
henceforth it is appropriated even guaranteed by the highest achievement of
26
25 The Listener, 5th December
The Listener 24th November 1966, 784, seeks to defe
26 Susan McClary, Feminine Endings. Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002 [c1991]), 108 9.
11 In other words, male genius has, once again, successfully turned qualities that limit a woman into great art. impressionist, seems to sit on the fence between the more traditional verdicts of her British critics and a later feminist rejection of serialism as a manipulative masculine exercise straddling Lutyens is damned if she does and
. Post-McClary then, paradoxically, we seem under no less pr l idiom than of tonality. In theory and practice, any composer, female or male, could use serial (as well as of course atonal) techniques in different ways and to different degrees, but for marginalised groups such as women composers, this decision can become an additional dilemma: is she a mere imitator if she does, or is she a romantic miniaturist if she does not? Lutyens appears to have gone all the way by adopting a technique which during her lifetime would remain firmly associated first with the Schoenberg school and then with the New Manchester Group.
Although she claimed time and again that she had invented her own version of serialism long before she knew any by the Viennese , it was by no means inevitable that she would stick with it as consistently as she did in her concert and stage music.27 This decision may have helped to establish her reputation of the English rebel composer in the long run (as opposed to a possible world in which she would have continued to compose in her pre-1939 idiom), but it also exposed her music to comparison with an influential and notorious set of men composers first among them Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, and Leibowitz and
(the latter two additionally having produced twelve-tone textbooks and analyses in French and
English in the 1940s). Always keen to stress her own individuality and that she never studied with a teacher from the Viennese circle, Lutyens felt she had to walk the line between charges
27 This excludes many of her scores for film and television. On her Lutyens, A Goldfish Bowl (London: 1972), 167 The Listener 8th July 1971, 57; an interview with Bernard Palmer in 1969 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02kycf4); or Elisabeth The Musical Times 122.1660 (1981), 368 9, 369.
12 of lacking originality (where she was perceived to follow too closely in the footsteps of the larger Viennese circle) and lacking coherence and justification
That she is evidenced by her countless comments on the originality of her serialism, but also, as the later analytical section of this paper will show, by her blatantly obvious disregard for some rules of serialism as applied by the Schoenberg circle. This attempt has created problems for feminist readings of her music, and particularly of O saisons, ô châteaux!, which have had to argue that Lutyens wanted to
in this piece to escape the comparison with serialism proper.28 More than claiming that her idiom (which is certainly true for any composer),29 this argument of feminisation presents, I suggest, a vulnerability prone to be attacked by a conservative historiography interested in keeping the canons of modernism exclusive, meaning here exclusively masculine. As I will show in the rest of this section, the feminisation argument is also unnecessary because of the ideology Lutyens herself provided to escape the second horn of her dilemma (charges of incoherence and random application of serialism). That is to say she was no less aware of the other extreme: that a twelve-tone composer without some kind of structural ideological foundation to justify and consolidate their serialism would have problems being taken seriously; and to be taken seriously to be a professional was most important to her.
Her thoughts on what mattered about her own
i.e. the aesthetic glue, so to speak can be found scattered in her many writings, interviews, and, in a slightly more condensed form, in her autobiography, and concerns the magical and numerological attributes of music. Over a long career, her thoughts slowly crystallised into
28 Sally MacArthur, Feminist Aesthetics in Music (Westport, CT, London: Greenwood Press, 2002), 100. 29 The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.2nd edn, ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan, 2001) vol. 15, 389.
13 the belief that voodoo, than elementary arithmetic or science (so often inaccurately aped by composers), which has a different function. 30 And in no other early piece is this credo more ingrained than in the cantata O saisons, ô châteaux!. While the next section examines the aesthetic
s claim magic in her choice of texts, its strategical advantages for her dilemma are obvious already. an aesthetic
- justified, she will be shown to successfully straddle originality and technical soundness.
That Lutyens felt an urgent need to declare her ownership of serialism is clear from the above statements and confirmed in the anecdote of her pretence to have wondered about the composer of Freischütz writing such strange music upon hearing her first Webern piece.31 But instead of responding by feminising her music ,
Lutyens sought to enchant serialism. With this idea she is in exalted company. Apart from
Scriabin, Crawford Seeger, Foulds, and many other composers, Webern and Schoenberg the latter sought to connect music and theosophical ideas; in this case those of gnosis and correspondence, as Wouter Hanegraaff has
shared aesthetics.32 Schoenberg, like Moses in
Moses and Aron, is driven to despair by the unspeakability of the message of the new law he must communicate (gnosis), while Webern
30 Lutyens, Goldfish Bowl, 305. 31 Elisabeth Lutyens in the interview with Bernard Palmer, 1969 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02kycf4), repeated in A Goldfish Bowl, 72, where she claims not to remember whether the piece in question was Bagatelles or Five Pieces. 32 in Laurence Wuidar (ed.): Music and Esotericism (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2010), 329 353, 332.
14 correspondences between row intervals, magical squares, and notions of Swedenborgian
33 Lutyens came to her magical credo on a much less straightforward and more painful path. Her experience of theosophy was not one of learned conversations and readings with learned friends resulting in the identification divine ,34 but of a hard and emotionally frustrating schooling by an institutionalised faith system, personified in her mother, Lady Emily Lytton, and Jiddu
Krishnamurti, who was raised by C.W. Leadbeater and Annie Besant as the coming world teacher. For the passionate teenager Elisabeth, theosophy meant suppressing her feelings in order to gain the acceptance of her mother and the strict Krishnamurti, as she would complain in her autobiography.35 in her acceptance as a pupil of the Seventh Root Master Koot Hoomi and in becoming a co- mason in 1925. But the following year, she banished theosophy from her life and spiritual contexts from her music apparently for good and returned permanently to London to study composition and viola at the Royal College of Music.
Although this moment marks the end of her autobiographical account of spirituality in her life and music, an affinity for esoteric literature, if nothing else, stuck throughout her career. For one, she met the poet when he visited her father, Sir
Edwin Lutyens, in the later 1920s.36 Yeats himself had defined his relationship to magic in a kind of credo :
33 Ibid., 348. 34 Ibid., 334. 35 Lutyens, Goldfish, 27 8 36 Lutyens, Goldfish, 40. Although she found Yeats in the highest regard. (Rob 368 9)
15 agic, in what I
must call the evocation of spirits [...], in the power of creating magical illusions, in the
37
There are several examples of Lutyens choosing texts with mystical or magical undertones:
- her Chaucer- (1957),
quote from his astrological and mystical discussion of the quincunx in her piece of the same name (1959 translation of Boethius in The
Country of the Stars (1963), the texts by the Sufi Abu Yazid Bistami and Arthur Rimbaud in
Essence of Our Happinesses Isis and Osiris
(1969), a selection of Yeats poetry in (1979), and, earliest but no less important for the eponymous Cantata (1946
7). i . As it presents itself in her set texts, this is a combination of art and speculative science, of alchemy and astrology, which deals with large questions such as time, death, or ritual. Frequently, her texts display an ambivalent relationship with nature; in the same sense that alchemy, with its drive to speed up chemical reactions or create noble metals from base ones, can also overturn
or masculine and feminine. In Isis and Osiris, for example, the god of writing, healing, and magic, Thoth, reassembles and resurrects the Nile god Osiris from his hacked corpse with spells and learning, allowing Egypt to prosper by bending the rules of nature. In O saisons, ô châteaux!, an accelerated reaction between serialism and a tonal heritage, between tone row and melody,
cterises
.
37 Essays and Introductions (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1961), 28.
16
O saisons, ô châteaux! serial work for solo voice and orchestra, and the only substantial piece of concert music composed in her otherwise eventful year of 1946.38 She had left London in the spring to attend a concert of her works in Paris, organised by the British
Council, and returned full of energy, if suspicious of serialism pularity in France:
-tone music was, by then, completely
accepted so that I lost the sense of utter isolation I had felt in musical England.
However, I amicably disagreed with Leibowitz for making an academicism of a
language still being formed. The implications to be derived from the music of Webern
had hardly begun, and I felt it was much too early to write a lexicon of grammar, as he
was doing.
Certainly that professional trip to Paris was like a shot of adrenalin, renewing my health,
restoring my confidence and morale, and infecting me with new hope and optimism for
the future. I have always felt England to be part of Europe, especially musically, and
now felt re-joined to the cultural past with new allies for th 39
importantly spells out her doubts about laying bare its secrets in a systematic, comprehensible, and generally available form.40 If the dodecaphonic magic was to keep its fascination, it could
38 Chamber Concertos nos. IV and V are variously dated around 1946/7, but are not mentioned by Lutyens in the corresponding chapter of her autobiography. 39 Lutyens, Goldfish to his treaty -ce que la musique de douze sons? Webern (Liège: Editions Dynamo, 1948) or his Introduction à la musique de douze sons. Les Variations Pour
40 alchemist would have refused to teach you; it is a science which cannot be taught at all. It is inborn or it is not Style and Idea [60th anniversary
17 not be for everyone a thought deeply inscribed also argue. As 1946 neared its end optimism about being part of a pan-
European serialism evaporated, as she found herself pregnant with what would have been her
sensible advice of her mother, her doctor, and her husband Edward Clark to have an abortion.41 Returning home from hospital she finished O saisons, ô châteaux!, a commission from Gerald Cooper for his concert series in the Wigmore
Hall, where it was premiered in February 1947. autobiography, the Cantata took its inception from her acoustic intentions, and not from the
. This way of picking texts after the first musical sketches had been made stayed with her the Wittgenstein Tractatus for her later piece was
impersonal, but not to go with the new piece.42 O saisons blows into the same horn of her post-theosophy claim that music must not be entangled with personal religious or amorous feelings:43
I had conceived the piece, even heard the complete sound in form and timbre and
begun the writing whilst still searching for the right words. I was hearing a soprano
voice, of the calibre of
her high register], in a soaring lyrical lament, supported by all variety of string sounds
edition, edited by Leonard Stein, Berkeley et al.: University of California Press, 1975], 386, quoted in accomplishments of the Schoenberg School and in possession only of the rules of twelve-tone composition, which have become apocryphal through separation from its accomplishments, these young people [young composers] amuse themselves with the juggling of tone rows as substitute for tonality, without really composing Essays on Music. Selected, with Introduction, Commentary, and Notes by Richard Leppert; New Translations by Susan Gillespie [Berkeley, London: University of California Press, 2002], 196). 41 Lutyens, Goldfish, 175-6. 42 Lutyens, Goldfish, 222 [italics original]. 43 Cf. Lutyens and Schafer, British Composers, 106 7: organized it may have the power to produce emotions in the listener, but those emotions are not inherent in the music
18 dedicatee] in the Gin and Gumboot and telling him of my word-search, he immediately,
with his intuitive understanding, suggested the short Rimbaud poem O Saisons, O
Châteaux!. 44
With a cantata set to a poem by the fashionable Arthur Rimbaud, Lutyens harnessed a sti and claimed her place in a long and illustrious line of Rimbaud settings.45 She (or
Davenport) chose not the better known version of the poem from the collection Une saison en enfer,46 but one of three other, substantially differing, versions of this poem with an unknown date of conception (fig. 1).
Ô saisons, ô châteaux,
Quelle âme est sans défauts?
Ô saisons, ô châteaux!
Ô vive lui, chaque fois,
Que chante son coq gaulois.
44 Lutyens, Goldfish, 168. 45 texts from the collections Illuminations Being Beauteous Départ [1988]) and Une saison en enfer Seasons in Hell. The Lives of Arthur Rimbaud [2003]). 46 This version would have been available in collections for the enthusiast of poetry such as Rimbaud, Les plus Collection de textes français publiée sous la direction de André Labarthe (Éditions Barnard vol. 3, London: Barnard & Westwood, Ltd., 1943), 147-8.
19
Ce Charme ! il prit âme et corps,
Et dispersa tous efforts.
Que comprendre à ma parole?
!
Ô saisons, ô châteaux!
Figure 1: , undated version used by Lutyens.
en vogue during the 1940s, providing the topic of reflection of the life and works, a Hogarth Press translation of verse poems, and several
47 The second edition (1947) of the latter, albeit just not
stay in Paris, Starkie highlights elements of alchemy and magic in the series of poems written in 1872. 48 closedness, addresses magical practice and the magician in several ways. Firstly, it features three keywords of magic: The persona
47 Wallace Fowlie, Rimbaud: The Myth of Childhood (London: Dennis Dobson Ltd., 1946); Selected Verse Poems of Arthur Rimbaud, trans. Norman Cameron (The New Hogarth Library, vol. 7, London: The Hogarth Press, 1942); Enid Starkie, Arthur Rimbaud (London: Faber & Faber, 1938, 1947, 1961). 48 Cf. Enid Starkie, Arthur Rimbaud (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1947 [1938]), 206 7. Nevertheless, it is highly unlikely that Davenport and Lutyens found the poem and this interpretation in this biography, as the first edition of 1938 does not contain these remarks and the revised edition was not published before 1947, when the piece had been written.
20 magique etude | Du Bonheur, que nul
Ce Charme! Il prit âme et corps | Et dispersa t 49 It finally celebrates the Gallic rooster in the verse | Que chante son coq
This symbol, although only vaguely associated with druidic beliefs through the homonymity of Gallus (Gaul) and gallus (rooster) in Latin, is still a national symbol of Gallic
France. Secondly, the prominent l which appears as opening, closing, and third line in the poem, seems to fulfil the function of this spell or incantation which obliterates all efforts, albeit
. Thirdly, t Que comprendre à ma parole? | Il
elle fuie et vole! not so much questions the usefulness of words or language, but seems to refer to that very secrecy of magical practices the uninitiated cannot understand the mag splendid isolation, bringing to mind Luty to attempts by Leibowitz
Additionally to these hints in its content, the poem is highly experimental in several formal aspects. Firstly, it leaves behind any traditional fixed verse form of its previous versions in favour of a 14-line structure, which is split into 2+1+2+2+2+2+2+1 lines. Secondly, its rhyme scheme AA A BB CC DD EE FF A likewise rebels against regular structures. In both
le for the interruptions of verse and rhyme structures. Thirdly, the poem is heterometric. The version
variously six or seven syllables. While the last two occurrences ô saisons, ô châteaux appear as six-syllabled monostiche, its first occurrence is bound up in a distiche with the second six- he majority of lines, however,
49 Arthur Rimbaud, Rimbaud Complete. Volume 1: Poetry and Prose, tr. Wyatt Mason (New York: Modern Library, 2003), the four versions of the poem on 356 60.
21 appear in seven-syllable distiches. According to Michel Murat, Rimbaud was complicating the poem further from version to version, with the one chosen by Davenport and Lutyens being the most complex and irregular one.50
Thus, this version has 14 lines (7+7), but it uses a highly irregular verse structure to obscure this fact. Next, its lines with seven syllables are in the majority, but by no means safe from interruption from six- or eight-syllabled lines. The mysterious anapaest
is the most insistent of these. The poem makes use of a game with numbers on two levels, an idea that would undoubtedly have appealed to most composers interested in
the number 7 would have delighted someone like Schoenberg, standing as it does for perfection (seven spheres and planets, sciences in quadrivium and trivium, musical modes, strings on the lyre, and of course pitch classes in a tonal scale). Despite understanding of dodecaphony as a rule-bound disenchantment of music,51 its obsession with the possibilities of series of numbers and their transpositions, inversions, and retrograde inversions could as well be interpreted as a re-enchantment of music, the return to its alchemy
that is to Pythagorean experiments with numbers and notes.
This re-
one of those, and even the foremost in her country. If the composer was half as bitter in 1946 as she would claim in retrospect in A Goldfish Bowl, her identification with the figure of the
, despite her much later reminiscence about her first, non-textual intuition, which seeks to downplay the importance of her chosen poem.
50 Michel Murat, de Rimbaud (Paris: José Corti, 2002), 95 6. 51 McClary, Feminine Endings, 108 9.
22 Like this magician, Lutyens imagined herself in a superior position due to her use of dodecaphony; a position, however, which made her (together with her husband Edward Clark) vulnerable to derision and lack of comprehension by British colleagues and critics:
Establishment for backing the wrong horses such as Schoenberg and Webern and
thereby setting ourselves outside the musical pale in the climate of musical England.
[...] To adopt a technique, like the 12-tone, associated with a German, Schoenberg
Purcell), was mittel- -English and iconoclastic. I was soon made to feel
like a Communist before the Committee for Un-
those many who sneered and jeered over the years, only to change their tune and
quickly jump on the band-wagon when the climate changed in England even the
critics realizing that being able to count to twelve instead of seven (as in classical
music) was not an insuperable difficulty. [.. It is not a
risk today. Then 52
also was a topic in later, summative, assessments of her music, with the
Cantata generally being viewed as one of her most important pieces. In a review of her on the occasion of her sixtieth birthday, Gerald Larner claims that the texts of O saisons, ô châteaux!, of the Motet Excerpta Tractati Logico-Philosophici (Wittgenstein) for unaccompanied chorus, and of the part-song The Country of the Stars (Boethius) for
inspired music of constructional unity, music of a self-sufficient
52 Lutyens, Goldfish, 167 8 (italics original). In this quote, the comparison between the communist and the serialist composer stand out. Although the Committee did not yet exist when Lutyens wrote the Cantata, the idea that both communism and serialism were perceived as the greatest dangers to Western civilisation is striking.
23 system or absolute singularity of mood, rather than sustained conflict and dialectical progress. 53 It could be argued that Larner attempts to pull Lutyens across the imaginary
-
Two further, posthumous, reviews
ability to channel feminine hysteria into a masterpiece. In the first of these two reviews, Brian
off on the music: The work completely transcends its brief time span, & by its extreme economy and taut control it transports the listener into a richly emotional world expressive of
54
Elias claims that the music is inspired by and profits from its s concentration.
Consequently, the music is able to unfold a large drama in only 7 duration. This idea was taken up by Malcolm Hayes, who however shifted his gist slightly towards a more feminised s piece: It subtly recalled Britten in its choice of text and scoring (the lady herself would have had something to say in reply to that remark, I do not doubt) but effortlessly met the claims made for it by Brian Elias in his introduction: the music perfectly caught the acute sens s brand of highly-charged
55 , but also
disembodied transcend its feminine side, physicality and ecstasy. Lutyens herself is credited with portraying the beauty of this genius.
53 The Listener, 24th November 1966, 784. 54 O saisons, ô châteaux! al broadcast of Lutyens works, 8th December 1983), in Elisabeth Lutyens, Letters to Brian Elias, with related material; 1965 1983. GB-Lbl Add. MS. 71114: 1965 1983, fol. 215 6. 55 Malcolm The Listener, 5th January 1984, 28 [emphasis original].
24 by which he alludes to Les Illuminations (1939).
Hayes apparently knew Lutyens well enough to admit that to claim that she was not being entirely original in the Cantata would have provoked an unprintable response from the composer. Although he may have been intending it ance
its of the beauty of masculine genius Rimbaud
ity, yet again. There can be no doubt that Britten, by this time, had emerged as the leading figure of British music and that
confusion over gender and genius here rears its head again. After all, own sexuality was not that of your everyday male procreating genius; in line with both clearly muddied the waters more than drawing distinct and neat lines between the genders.
binds together several components of a complex situation.
While the text chimes extraordinarily well with her pessimistic evaluation of her own professional situation in 1946 as a serial composer in a musically conservative country, it also lays out her programme, or intention, for her chosen compositional technique the enchantment of serialism. At the same time, she picked a text which her critics came to read
, and stimulating her creative powers which were not always perceived of as fully original. O saisons, ô châteaux! has as good as nothing in common with, for example, A Survivor from Warsaw, but this is partly because Lutyens has different considerations in mind: Her choice of text announced her individual understanding of her distinguished but contested position in British musical life, and her complaint of hav
25 read as 56 She considers herself the outsider par excellence an English modernist woman composer.57
By paying so much attention to the set text and invoking its repercussions in the following analytic observations of O saisons, ô châteaux!, I go against what Lutyens would have wished. After her break with theosophy, she maintained that her music was expressive only of itself and did not bow to extra-musical content or meaning. Her remark about beginning to compose the piece before finding the text must be read in this vein. What is more, it is even possible that she regarded serialism in general as a failsafe way to achieve this independence in her compositions. Nevertheless, her later magical credo and, not least, put this claim in context. As this section will argue, Lutyens
neither in a Walsh , no defensive sense, which
rebellion against an imaginary Viennese textbook. Serving this purpose, the following analytic observations address , some of which can also be observed in works of the Schoenberg school. Among these is the dovetailing of rows (as in ) or the suspension of the
(as in ). The aim here, however, is not to construct
point out ways in which she bends an inherent rigidity in order to achieve a new magical notion of serial modernism in O saisons, ô châteaux! and thereby to transcend what she and her contemporaries perceived as
56 Cf. Lutyens, Goldfish, 168. 57 It could be added that she was an outsider even in terms of class. Born into an, occasionally explosive, marriage between middle and upper classes, her London life had been jumbled up during the War with the temporary evacuation of herself, Edward Clark, and their children to different places, and she emerged impoverished and resentful of her financial reliance on the upper-class parts of her family.
26 the woman composer curse in this respect is repetition at different levels of the structure, which follow on from two other layers of row manpulation.
The row Grundgestalt and the first burst of the vocal line present a reminder of its
( for her music for high voice, ex. 1a and 1b). In this respect the piece foreshadows such works as The
Valley of Hatsu-Se (1965) in its In 1946, she was studying Dido and Aeneas by Purcell, the composer whose string fantasias she claimed had given her the idea for her serialism.58 Indeed, the prominence of descending semitones in the row of O saisons, ô châteaux! of h
59
Over the course of the composition of O saisons Lutyens changed her mind over the genre of
lament from a serenade to a cantata. These terms, however, say more about her intentions than about the final shape. The earliest written genre ascription as a serenade is recorded in pencil on her manuscript and is also mirrored in the texture and orchestration (plucked and submerged strings with a voice rising above them).60 Despite
58 Cf. footnote 52; Laurel Parsons, Sarah Jane Tenant-Flowers, A Study of Style and Technique in the Music of Elisabeth Lutyens, PhD Diss., University of Durham, 1991, 165. 59 Note counting of this row reveals the following matrix, which is in itself of a certain beauty, with its pc 0 running diagonally through all transpositions:
27 these similarities with the serenade of Viennese classicism and the (probably coincidental) fact that at genre (the Serenade op. 24
A
Survivor of Warsaw -1800 cantata with its combination of solo voice and instrumental, often chamber accompaniment. It borrows specifically from an English variant of the genre, which had split from the dominant Italian form, preferring less Arcadian and more profane texts with a freer form (usually binary) with instrumental ritornellos in accordance with the chosen text all features that can also be found in O saisons, ô châteaux!.61
Sarah Tenant- in her pioneering PhD thesis was the first to claim, correctly, that the piece is constructed serially throughout an important statement as it allows us to unleash the full range of analytic tools for serialism onto the piece and, at the same time, acquits the composer from the crudest Rousseauvian accusation of the inability to compose a coherent piece of music.62 The instrumental introduction, the first of four sections, fulfils this promise to the greatest degree (fig. 1).63
61 Colin Timms The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan, 2001), version at Grove Music Online, ed. Laura Macy.
28 prime [P] and inversion [I] material of the introduction A frames the two middle sections. Of these, section
B only uses P material and section C only retrograde [R] and retrograde inversion [RI] material. With the beginning of section B in b.42, irregularities break up the neat serial structure of the previous section A. Although this section B only uses
P transpositions, it deploys strongest magical strategies in short succession; dovetailing and rotation of rows, omissions of and added pcs in row occurrences up to the splitting of rows, and repetitions within rows.
Firstly, Lutyens frequently dovetails rows. A first instance occurs as early as bb. 23 4 (still in section A), where the cello oscillates between different consecutive pitches of two different I transpositions in a tremolo. The major occurrence in section B is in b. 45, which ties together
first phrase, in which pcs A and A
This causes this next occurrence of the row to be a rotation (order nos. 11, 12, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,
7, 8, 9, 10). The the soprano is accompanied only by
In bb. 51 3, dovetailing even leans over into disaggregation with its generous but apparently random spreading of pcs from P-3 and P-5 (ex. 3). diagnoses that this moment
Furthermore, she observes
29 simple note-count.64 Olive carefully skirts pejorative language with a high density of scare quotation marks, implying that these collapses of rule- bound seriali claim to high-quality serialism. What can be observed in these bars is that the row submits to the priority of a descend in all parts, particularly in the middle bar he third beat of this bar is owed to this need for the parts to descend.) Whether bb.51 3 constitute a breakdown of the row, an extreme case of dovetailing, a disintegration into several pc collections, or a serial-tonal hybrid is a typical question in this piece and eludes a clear decision. It is, moreover, a moot question for Lutyens. The two transformations of the prime row running in tandem through the four string parts are not organised to elude or avoid a strict serial organisation but so as to increase drama and remind listeners of the lamenting character.
For the largest part, examples of dovetailing and rotation are normal occurrences in much serial music and leave the paradigm of the ordered set untouched. Lutyens, however, deploys a second layer of row manipulation, which interferes with the fabric. It also introduces an element of enchantment into the piece by means a close connection of row manipulation and set text. This firstly covers the omission of one pc in an otherwise complete row in one part, which is then frequently added in another part. The first and crucial occurrence of this device is in the statement of P-0 in section B (bb. 42 4, cf. ex. 2). Here, the soprano melody consists of order nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 8, while guitar, harp, and strings already hold a pedal on nos. 6, 8, 9, 10, and 12. This overlapping complementation (which even doubles some
64
30 pcs), cannot hide the fact that nos. 7 and 11 are on a superficial glance missing from this set. However, both do appear eventually in the right moment in the row i.e. simultaneous with 6 and 10. Yet no. 7 only appears in a dark and very quiet cello and bass pedal that lasts for nearly four bars. That this particular order number is obscured so suspiciously here is hardly a coincidence: the soprano strides through the magic spell (the title line O saisons, ô châteaux!), which itself lacks the seventh syllable (the poetic implications of which were discussed above). Although such omissions or hidden order numbers occur throughout the piece, the resulting subsets of the row more frequently miss no. 7 than other order numbers (bb. 64 [missing 1 5 and 7], 79 80, and 101 [missing 7 and 12]).
Secondly and on the other end of the spectrum, on one occasion the soprano adds one tone to
able by the poem. In bb. 94, the soprano drops in a dramatic glissando down into a distinctly lower register for the half-line
(ex. 4). This is also the beginning of a new I transformation, in which the soprano part runs through the order nos. 1 10, while the ensemble plays with different sub- collections consisting of two pcs each. In b. 95, C
(spell); it splices the running row by perching between nos. 2 and 3 of the same transformation. This enrichment threatens the dominance of the row, but clearly the priority is to highlight the dynamic climax and a metric and register change. It provides a dramatic effect of this spell [es] soul and body and dispers[es] .
Thirdly, this secondary layer of manipulation covers the splitting of rows between parts to various degrees up to the point of condensing row transformations into unordered collections.
31 The penultimate line of the poem, a case in point. four different P and I row transpositions, which each account for the pc content of between one and three bars of this eight-bar episode but do not overlap (ex. 5, bb. 101 8). The soprano part pc content is accounted for in each transposition; but since the four row transformations are condensed into unordered collections, the melody is no neat row occurrence but a pick-and-mix of pcs from these collections. Again, Lutyens plays with her set text, which here emphasises the
While the structure of this speech (or of the row pcs) may be obscure, the initiated knows that a powerful force (the row and its transformations) is at work beneath the seeming nonsense on the surface.
Overlapping, dovetailing, and split rows provide Lutyens with a close connection with her set text, but they also account for a degree of her particular non-Webernian timbre. The vocal line features intervals which do not occur in the row or its transformations, such as major seconds and fourths (cf. ex. 5). Missing pcs are provided in the ensemble. The dovetailing of rows offers a way to allow rows to flow into each other without edgy section borders or awkward rests. The third, most striking, and important feature of O saisons, however, is its repetitions.
In the later stages of her career, Lutyens was a confident user of pedal points, cell or collection repetition, or even whole repeated phrases. On one end of the spectrum in this respect stands the Concertante for Five Players op. 22 Pierrot ensemble combination). Here, the violin provides a sort of pitched crotchet metronome throughout the entire Lento . This metronome is emphasised through the curiously hollow sound of its interval between the open D string and the D flageolet two octaves above it. On the other end sits the lyric drama Isis and Osiris.
32 lament on the death of Osiris, time seems to stop as Isis [sic] herself, and
soliloqu , arguably
which was published as a stand-along piece and recorded65). the giving of time towards rituals of death and the loss of time (or a sense of it). By arresting the flow of the tone row in repetitive melodic phrases, Lutyens prepares this turn of focus.
Thus in the later part, two multi-bar phrases are each repeated four times; the first mirrors the
of my sweet Nile; mourn, o mourn, the death of Northern winds; mourn, o mourn, the
(ex. 6). The second is an enumeration of all the things that will die or disappear as a consequence of the loss of Osiris withering of all the trees; the flowe
(ex. 7). Even within this phrase, Lutyens repeats the first two pitches of the three-tone cell B
On a more basic level, the striking similarity between the in the opera and the soprano first line in O saisons, ô châteaux! (ex. 8, cf. ex. 1b) show that
Lutyens returned to chromaticism and repetition as markers of (magical) ritual in a later lament for high voice.
65 Album Elisabeth Lutyens (1906 1983). NMC Recordings, 1992/2012. Minstrels.
33
O saisons features no large-scale phrase repetitions like Isis and Osiris or metronomic pedal points like the Concertante, but prototypes of these very characteristic devices appear in the
Cantata. s sense of arrested time, for example, is achieved by dramatic repetition effects such as the harmonically completely static transition from section A into B
(bb. 38 41), which spreads order nos. 1 6 of an inversion transposition vertically through the ensemble and repeats them insistently through a crescendo into their climactic resolution in b.
66
Two moments of larger-scale repetition stand out in O saisons; the first and most memorable in bb. 60 3, where a broken chord in the solo violin is pinned against a different pedal point in the ensemble, and the second in bb. 73 5, where string parts repeat various two-note cells.
The former figure constitutes one the most dramatic moments in the Cantata, but it is harmonically ambiguous (ex. 9) motif could be described as a B minor chord in first inversion, or else as the pc collection [037], or as order nos. 6, 10, and 11 of the
prime form. The remaining instruments (mandolin, harp, and strings) hold a pedal composed of a chromatic tetrachord, or the symmetric pc collection [0167], or order nos. 1, 8,
9, 12.
In either scenario Lutyens would partake in contemporary traditions of taking dodecaphony beyond note counting and towards expressivity. Yet to ask whether this ambiguity also constitutes a clash between tonal and atonal elements or of a hierarchical and a symmetric pc collection or rather a tonal-serial hybrid may yet again be the wrong question, as it would seek
66 The opposite effect occurs in bb. 87 90), where similarly stacked-up pedal points in the ensemble disappear gradually in a diminuendo al niente.
34 to locate Lutyens in a struggle between (male) insiders and (female) outsiders of some kind of superior serialist technique. Lutyens is neither a member of a Viennese mainstream serialism whose rules she would be interested in breaking, but nor does she need to be portrayed as the outsider woman composer with an incomplete grasp of the technique and the resulting need to tame it. This short section shows Lutyens searching for less rigid forms of expression through twelve-tone music, a search which yet again leads her back to the magical properties and allusions of her set text: The collection of order nos. in these four questionable bars misses its no. 7; the m is yet again an ambiguous one. One of the most perplexing moments of the piece thus lines up with careful path past the pitfalls of masculine vs. feminine interpretations of serialism.
Where questions of the hybridity of tonality and serialism are concerned, this and other occurrences have proved problematic for O saisons
MacArthur what she provokingly calls liberal sprinklings of tonal language 67 They occur throughout the piece and are vaguely reminiscent of an Austro-German fin-de-siècle tradition of composers such as Schreker, Zemlinsky, or
Mahler. These moments hinge on brief occurrences of, for example, C
F minor/major (b. 16), B major (b. 28), and E
marker of lament. While it is tempting to read them as , the do not actually violate whichever row transformation dominates the surrounding pitch organisation. Rather, they assist twelve-tone alchemy, which seeks to create the lump of gold (a lush sounding piece of music) from base materials (12 pcs in structured in collections or rows), just as the above ambiguity between B minor and a tetrachord skirts decisions for or against strict serialism or tonality.
67 MacArthur, Feminist Aesthetics, 99 100.
35
In defence of her claim that a twelve-tone piece needs to sound good, above all, Lutyens herself maintained that the proof of the pudding 68 This lamenting and magical sound Lutyens identified early on in the composition process as the
. Yet, d to unordered
s integrity, if this composer is the wife of a Schoenberg pupil and claims to have invented it all on her own. As a consequence, feminist authors like MacArthur have sought to defend Lutyens against potential attacks that might denigrate a serialism that does not adhere to an imaginary textbook.
Lutyens was of course no less unable able to follow a set of rules of serialism than any other composer sitting down to write a piece of music. The difference between her and an established set of serial composers such as Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern is therefore not that she actually uses the technique differently, but that her decisions concerning the technique are frequently read in a different light (with the additionally complicating factor that she was British). Thus her well-known judgments about
Schoenberg, which in their turn in
The Atonal Music of Arnold Schoenberg, 1908 1923:
mastery of style is, without question, exemplary. Yet, the aesthetic
underpinning serialism could be viewed as the most alienating territory of all for a
68 Elisabeth Lutyens, A Working Life
36 woman to enter. It is arguably the most rule-ridden, rational style of music to have
emerged, despite, perhaps, sounding highly dissonant, chaotic, and disorganised. In her
critique of Schoenberg, Susan s invention of serialism,
an invention of the highest intellectual achievement, allowed him to continue creating
what she describes as his s discourse of the earlier, atonal, expressionist
works, such as Erwartung (Expectation), while at the same time ridding the music of its
feminine associations. 69
music:
Far from sounding irrational and chaotic, then, as McClary implies is the case with
[O saisons, ô châteaux!] sounds coherent as if it has
e that at a subconscious level
project was to defeminize his music by shifting focus away from the sound of the music
to the written particularities of the score 70
What i
71 The composer would probably have strongly refuted this reading, as can be gleaned from utterances in her autobiography and elsewhere. She was very much a child of the generation of composers who, like Maconchy,
a career breaker.72
69 MacArthur, Feminist Aesthetics, 97 8. 70 Ibid., 99. 71 Ibid., 99 100. 72 conservative stance towards the New Music, rather than against gender stereotypes.
37 Nevertheless, O saisons, ô châteaux! seems to confirm a feminised serialism to a large degree: It has a lush, impressionist string texture and, like much British concert music of the early twentieth century, is rich in tunes, and features longer duration values or pedal points. However, any feminine softness is balanced, if not overturned, by fluctuating dynamic waves enabled by these same pedal points and long durations. The dynamic centre is in fact piano, with wide variations in both directions. The piece starts and ends in pianissimo, and at times soars to a triple forte (b. 26, strings; repeated sfz in b. 59, upper strings) or retreats to a triple piano (b. 90, guitar, strings al niente; b. 101, strings). The least common dynamic indication is the exact middle between these extremes mezzoforte.
Instead, sharp crescendi and decrescendi dominate the scene already in the first seven bars, which see a compressed surge from pianissimo to fortissimo (paralleled in density of texture), which then recedes.
Needless to say, such devices as tonal allusions, strings, and melody in a serial piece are not
. Gendered pigeonholing of in the literature obscures the fact that she was working on a solution for a dilemma that haunted strict twelve-tone music the limitation of expression as opposed to danger of betraying its roots by seeking to counter this limitation by allowing tonal allusions. In contemporary accounts, the intrusion of tonality into serialism for the purpose of widened expressive range was discussed. A few examples may suffice: In
1940, Ernst Krenek had published his manual of serialism, whose first lesson taught the student to avoid rows with too many tonal intervals (major and minor triads).73 In 1947,
Schoenberg replied defensively to a letter from Leibowitz, who had alerted Schoenberg to the tonal sounds in several of his works:
73 Ernst Krenek, Studies in Counterpoint. Based on the Twelve-Tone Technique (New York: G. Schirmer, 1940), p. 1.
38
It was not my purpose to write dissonant music, but to include dissonance in a logical
manner without reference to the treatment of the classics: because such a treatment is
74
Virgil Thomson, finally, reflected in The Score in 1952 that nontonal music, any music of which the key and mode are consistently obscure, has so far always turned out to be contrapuntal. It cannot be harmonic in the conventional sense, because chords pull everything back into a tonal syntax 75
Even in later twentieth-century assessments of serialism, this topic still lived on, for example in David Matthews claim with regard to the expressiveness:
musical language which he
formulated and from which most currently fashionable styles are descended, is limited
the most successful have been those who have expressionist things to say: Peter
states of joy,
gaiety, exuberance. If composers still want to express such emotions in their music, they
velopment from orthodox
74 Erwin Stein (ed.), Arnold Schoenberg. Letters (London: Faber&Faber, 1964), 248. 75 Virgil Thomson The Score 6 (May 1952), 11 4.
39 tonality to pantonality has always been a potent vehicle for the widest range of
expression. 76
stretch between limiting technique and forbidden tonal pleasures :77 association, his expressive aims remained traditionally humanistic, concerned with the representation, and possible transmission, of subjective feelings like erotic love (in the Lyric
Suite), or grief and consolation (in the Concerto). It was to these ends that Berg sublimated the intellectual curiosity that attracted him to technical tours de force. 78 boldly takes this step into the unknown, enchanting serialism with old wisdom (tonality) and so infusing it with expressivity.
of tonality because her innovations have so far been read as feminisation a label that has rarely helped any artist or composer in the patriarchal structures of the Western world. The new magical serialism in O saisons, ô châteaux! stems from an individual and specific expressive aesthetic flowing into it from its set text, but it does not provide an all- encompassing principle for twelve-tone music. Yet the Cantata may serve as a reminder that the solutions of the Schoenberg school cannot claim that privilege either. Rather, unique perspective on the technique and her early rethinking of locate the piece firmly within the canons of an innovating modernism. interest in magic, a pre-modern, anti-mechanical, and elitist practice connects her to fellow modernists
Yeats, van Dieren, and Lambert on the one hand, and to the numerological Schoenberg on the
76 David Matthews in Tempo 65.257 (2011), 2 10, 3. 77 The Rest Is Noise, 226. 78 Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 4, p. 719.
40 other. If the serial strategies in O saisons, ô châteaux! are understood as
79 then the fact will be overlooked that women composers work no less creatively around technical restrictions than their male counterparts. But more importantly, MacArthur blows into the same horn as the masculinist tradition she criticises with this argument of feminisation: If seriali tonalised in order for a woman to find it a useful way of organising her pitch, then the technique is indeed essentially masculine and only a tonal serialism can be heard as non-masculinist and dealt with by women.
For a combative and defensive Elisabeth Lutyens, composing was always going to be a balancing act between charges of imitation and inability, an act which she mastered with characteristic verve. Yet, the gendered perception of her earlier experiments with serialism has obscured the relevance of (at least some of) her works for pre-1950s British modernism.
Lutyens seemed caught between the rejection of traditional analysis of feminist New
Musicology scholars ( MacArthur) and a still male dominated canon and understanding of serial music. A compromise is a contextual analysis which, for instance, reads O saisons ô châteaux! in the tradition of an enchanted modernism, but highlights its points of departure from the means used by similarly minded composers to this end: O saisons does not go near standard serial traits such as a Grundgestalt designed according to numerical considerations, or transformations drawn from a row matrix or permutations. understanding of serialism is more melodic, designed to fit its set text. If more than 30 years of musicological discourse about gender, canon, and analysis have been good for anything, it must be that such a compositional strategy is not considered automatically feminine anymore and thus, by default, dry , The, in the twenty-first century
79 MacArthur, Feminist Aesthetics, 99.
41 rare, situation of ongoing canon building in the complex field of British musical modernism can only profit from a commitment to this insight and the firm embracement of its women composers.
42